Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Source. Theorem 4, printed p. 12 (PDF p. 13) of the 22 May 2001 author manuscript.
Statement
There is a finite covering of the integers with moduli such that:
- for every positive integer , at most three indices satisfy ;
- every is odd and greater than ;
- every has at least two distinct prime factors.
Proof pointer. The construction and its verification occupy the rest of Section 4, through printed p. 19 (PDF p. 20); the paper reports (p. 19) that the covering it builds uses 6928899 congruences. They were not reconstructed or independently checked here.
The paper observes (p. 12) that Theorem 4 gives an odd covering if each odd modulus may carry up to three congruences, and that a covering as in Theorem 4 with "three" replaced by "two" in (i) would give an with reducible for all .
Bears on. The result is a repeated-modulus relaxation of Problem 7. It does not give a covering with distinct moduli.